Bill Gates handed over the CEO position on January 13, 2000 to Steve Ballmer, an old college friend of Gates and employee of the company since 1980, creating a new position for himself as Chief Software Architect.531 Various companies including Microsoft formed the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance in October 1999 to, among other things, increase security and protect intellectual property through identifying changes in hardware and software. Critics decry the alliance as a way to enforce indiscriminate restrictions over how consumers use software, and over how computers behave, a form of digital rights management; for example the scenario where a computer is not only secured for its owner, but also secured against its owner as well.3233 On April 3, 2000, a judgment was handed down in the case of United States v. Microsoft,34 calling the company an “abusive monopoly”;35 it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2004.13 On October 25, 2001 Microsoft released Windows XP, unifying the mainstream and NT lines under the NT codebase.36 The company released the Xbox later that year, entering the game console market dominated by Sony and Nintendo.RPO was first brought to the UK by former ‘Dragon’ James Caan who still delivers RPO to global businesses via his strategic resourcing company, HB Retinue.